JLL’s 2026 index names India the most-improved APAC market, with $8.1B in cross-border investment, a 20-year high. However, regulatory and data reforms have lagged.
JLL's 2026 Global Real Estate Transparency Index carries a genuinely notable headline for India, it topped the list of most-improved real estate markets across Asia-Pacific this year, ahead of Vietnam, South Korea, Australia and Thailand. Two-thirds of the 88 countries and territories JLL tracked showed meaningful transparency gains, and Asia-Pacific accounted for half of the 10 most-improved markets globally.
But the report is careful not to frame this as uncomplicated good news, it explicitly flags that "the transparency gap between leading and less transparent markets is widening," meaning India's progress, while real, still needs to be read against a moving benchmark.
What makes India's position credible rather than a single-year fluke is the consistency behind it. JLL noted India is "the 4th most improved over 10 years, and 3rd over 20 years in the GRETI surveys," a track record of steady structural improvement rather than a sudden spike tied to one policy change. That sustained trajectory has coincided with a sharp rebound in cross-border investment across the region, with India recording its highest-ever transaction volumes and attracting $8.1 billion in cross-border investment, a 20-year high.
Also Read: CBRE Captures 55% of India's Real Estate Investment Sales Market in H1 2026
JLL's framing here is worth sitting with directly. The report describes the AI and data centre wave as "not just a tailwind, but the catalyst that can propel India's real estate markets onto the global institutional stage, provided its frameworks scale at the speed of opportunity." That's a meaningful qualifier, the opportunity itself isn't in question, but JLL is explicit that India's regulatory and technological infrastructure has to catch up to actually capture it at scale, rather than assuming demand alone will carry the sector there.
JLL doesn't pull punches on the specifics. Land pooling mechanisms aimed at consolidating fragmented private parcels remain at an early stage nationally, a detail that lines up closely with what we've already tracked in Delhi specifically, where MPD-2047's land pooling policy has applications and pooled hectares climbing, but still just one sanctioned plan out of a much larger pipeline.
City-level Master Plans, the report notes more broadly, are largely moving through administrative approvals rather than full-scale implementation, echoing the exact concern raised by residents at DDA's own recent MPD-2047 stakeholder meetings about regulations taking too long to actually get notified. Contract enforcement also remains uneven across jurisdictions, with dispute resolution often taking considerable time, a familiar pattern given how long some of the RERA compensation cases we've covered this year have dragged on.
Worth Reading: Data Centres Are Reshaping Wall Street's $17 Billion Real Estate Bond Market
Beyond land and legal reform, JLL flags a genuine digital divide. Broader scaling of GIS-based digitisation and drone mapping beyond pilot cities is needed to convert planning initiatives into measurable, uniformly implemented outcomes nationwide. Technology adoption in property acquisition and sales continues to lag more advanced markets, and data availability varies considerably across India's secondary cities, gaps that better-resourced markets have already closed.
Standardised practices like data rooms for rent rolls, CRM-based financial analysis and digitised documentation remain concentrated in top-tier gateway cities rather than extending to secondary markets, and even tenants' formal ability to audit landlord accounts, while improving, still trails more mature markets.
The report's closing point is essentially a roadmap, "Expanding these practices beyond leading metros will be key to converting India's score gains into further rank improvement, given how competitive this parameter already is globally." In plain terms, India's momentum is real, but sustaining it means pushing the same technological and regulatory standards that exist in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru out into the country's secondary markets too.
This report gives useful, independent context to a lot of what's already been tracked closely this year, Delhi's Master Plan 2047 stakeholder process, land pooling's slow but real progress, and the institutional capital chasing GCC and data centre demand across Gurugram and Noida.
JLL's core message is that India's opportunity here is genuine but conditional, buyers and investors evaluating any large-scale, infrastructure-linked project should treat the pace of regulatory notification and land pooling implementation as a real risk factor worth checking, not just a bureaucratic footnote, since JLL itself is flagging execution speed as the deciding factor between India capturing this wave and merely benefiting from it on paper.
